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Preview Jaunt's Made-for-VR 360 Degree, 3D Short Films

Posted by timothy on from the surround-vision dept.

An anonymous reader writes Jaunt, a company that's raised more than $34 million to create a platform for live-action cinematic virtual reality experiences, has set out to demonstrate their toolset by producing three made-for-VR short films that are shot in 360 degrees and in 3D. Road to VR has an exclusive preview of the films, which the company says will have interactive trailers released very soon for Oculus Rift and Android (for use with Cardboard and other smartphone VR adapters).

1 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. It's not true 3D and it doesn't need to be. by PJ6 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is not an ad. Early VR projects are interesting, and this post (even though it could be used for publicity) belongs here.

    Yes, you can technically make 360 degree 3D. You can even make it work even when the viewer tilts their head, if you have a ball of cameras and the right software to correctly adjust the view for each eye in real time according to head position. Jaunt's camera is not a ball. It's a disk. Yes, it could still be accurate 3D as long as you don't tilt your head. They say it's 3D, but it's not very high quality or convincing. In fact I wasn't able to tell if it was really 3D or just seeing the same view through both my eyes.

    That being said, they do not need to have it in 3D at all. VR is already *very* convincing without 3D and the effect of parallax disappears at 20 feet or so. I didn't feel it was required at all for the demo videos they showed me.

    I built my own 2x4K VR camera, specifically designed for accurate 3D, and demoed alongside Jaunt in Boston. It's got 90x170 degrees FOV, which is more than enough to cover the DK2 horizontal FOV, and almost enough to cover its 100 degree vertical FOV. For one of my demo videos, I put peanut butter under the camera and recorded my dog licking it. Everyone responded the same, putting their arms up in front of them to wave him away. There were some squeals of delight. That's the point of 3D VR, in my opinion - accuracy and proximity, to make you really feel like something is there in front of you. Otherwise you might as well just go 360 and not sweat parallax accuracy, like Jaunt did.

    I was getting ready to sell my cameras, make movies, and work with other people improving the rig design, but honestly I thought there'd be more talent and interest to work with. Boston really isn't anywhere close to being a Silicon Valley of the East. And I say that being an MIT graduate myself.